


The Cage

by KrinnDNZ



Category: Pitch Black (2000), Riddick (2013), The Chronicles of Riddick (2004), The Chronicles of Riddick Series
Genre: F/M, Transformation, Xenophilia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-27
Updated: 2014-10-27
Packaged: 2018-02-22 19:16:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2518847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KrinnDNZ/pseuds/KrinnDNZ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Much older, a little wiser, and even more of an apex predator than ever, Riddick returns to M6-117 looking for someone who understands him: another predator.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Cage

Years later Riddick returned to the desert, to M6-117. He slipped in easily, as though it were night in the desert again and he the only predator. They'd given the planet another name, something that sounded more like a flower than a rock, cactus, or scorpion. It wasn't that he liked "M6-117," but it was a stark, uncaring name for a stark, uncaring place. The colonists only had one city and a distant speckling of outposts, but the city had survived one eclipse and was busy trying to tell itself that it could survive another. Maybe.

Visitors weren't common, but those they got, often didn't want to talk about what brought them to the desert. He would tell them that he'd come to town to leave town, and they'd chuckle, make wry smiles, and take his money. The desert lent itself to things like enveloping cloaks, which helped. After decades, the shine job had made it far easier for him to see in the dark than in the day, and one piece of machinery, dirty but functional, had come to be part of him. A knee here, a hand there, a patch of neck that helped scrub his blood—it added up. On top of that, there'd been the genetic treatments, by doctors none too stable. He'd been finding others to keep him together, but the universe, considered as a whole, was stark and uncaring, and you only lived through it for as long as you could fight for your place.

Others had tried to make him fight for their places, their causes, their wars and crusades and short-sighted grudges. It had never worked out. Riddick was a predator, not a builder—a brutal sort of creature, but very beautiful if you liked things that could kill you quickly. Riddick did like those, as well as a few things that could kill you slowly.

What he'd learned from Helion Prime, from Slam City, and from Lupus 5, was that most people didn't think that the universe was stark and uncaring, didn't think predators were beautiful, and died fairly quickly when the universe happened to expose that they were wrong. With age, he'd also learned that many of them were happier being wrong as long as they got to eat, fuck, and go about their lives. It made him grind his teeth, when he was around them. Which was as little as he could get away with.

It wasn't, he reflected as he made his way into the badlands, picking along a wide dry ravine, that he disliked them. It was simply that most of them needed a lesson that was very difficult to impart without getting them killed, and he certainly wasn't going to be the one to teach that. He did have a thought or two about how it might be done, though. Like any other large fight, you'd want a force multiplier. Some advantage that meant one of you could deal with a lot of them. Ideally one that you could ride for a long time, that would keep being an advantage for as long as you could push it.

He crouched at the end of the ravine, sat on a stone, and took stock. Pulling back the robe, he consulted a panel on his forearm, his free hand moving to his chest, palm over his heart, noting the vibrations from his machinery. He still had a solid charge of energy, the micro-fusion reactor in his chest adapting well to the new task he'd had programmed into it, interacting with his genetic programming. He had maybe two hours before the tipping point.

Sharp-edged shadows from the pitiless sun made jagged lines on one side of the ravine, falling across the outlines of the rocks. Riddick picked around among them, a long staff helping him nudge and explore until a boulder moved the way he'd needed. He smiled as a fleeting memory passed, as a stone moved aside and exposed a spot of cold, inky darkness in the middle of the hot bright desert.

"You're not afraid of the dark, are you?" he asked it.

He pushed his goggles up and off, revealing shining eyes, and tucked them away as he made his way into the cave. He moved slowly, sinuously, crouched and conservative, letting the silence of the place soak into him and flow through him uninterrupted. Scored and rough, the smoothing erosion of water long absent, the tunnels twisted deeper and deeper under the rocky desert, and Riddick made his way towards their heart.

The other thing he'd learned from being a predator followed from the lesson that you had to fight for your place in order to live through anything. You could only fight for so long. Then you'd die. Someone would get you and the universe would move on. It was comforting, in its bleak way, the knowledge that the everyone was playing by the same rules and that just because someone got you, didn't mean that they were just unbeatable and that was that. It meant that everyone had their time. Everyone. That comfort, peculiar as it was, was one of the reasons he resented the Necromongers. They cheated, was how he felt about it.

The last thing that he'd learned from predators was that if you had a chance to cheat and get away with it, you cheated hard and you cheated soon. Which was why he was back here with what he'd learned and what he'd become, making his way past one sleeping nest of bio-raptors after another. He left the little ones without even really looking at them, but the bigger ones were signposts. The nests were sixes and sevens and tens at first, but once he found a few that were twelve or fifteen strong, the sleek photophobic predators slumbering together and waiting for the eclipse, he knew where to go.

He ached as he reached a larger chamber, a huge one, and could tell without looking at his forearm panel (would've made too much light to use it, anyhow) that he was approaching his time limit. It was a self-imposed limit - but that was better than just waiting for someone to get him. You never got to know ahead of time when that would be. So he'd made sure he chose an earlier time for himself --- and chosen who would get him. She was beautiful and perfect.

Riddick moved as slowly as he could bear towards the titanic, slumbering bioraptor queen. She was curled amid ranks of guards and consorts, heavy, stonelike eggs nestled between their bodies, waiting with the adults. Her crest was taller than Riddick himself, and her fangs were like every brutally beautiful shiv he'd seen in every double-max he'd known. Her long grey body was sinuous and muscular, wings tucked in gracefully, tail curled.

He knelt beside her and slowly put a hand on her head, whispering, closing his eyes, using what he'd learned from the Necromongers. His other hand rested on his chest, fingers shaking, feeling how few minutes he had left.

"Listen to me," he told her soundlessly. "You live in a cage. This planet is a tiny cave, and every eclipse, your children spill from one half of it to the other, tearing one another apart, smashing themselves against the walls, falling into the canyons and collapsing at the end. Escape the cage. Roam, breed, hunt. Come with me."

* * *

She awoke in the body of a human man, and her chest hurt. She was tiny, frail, soft—yet there was something strong inside her. She stood on legs far less steady than the long powerful body she'd been born to, and clutched her chest, huffing, heaving, swaying. It was like the heat of the long day coming from inside her, making her howl and kneel. Her vision of the world was strange and bright, and before her lay her own body, huge and inert. Her forearm was glowing with a painful light.

The flesh of her chest split suddenly, and her widening shoulders pulled her robe taut across her body. When she reached up to pull at it, she saw her hand, stubby-fingered and clawless. As she turned and flexed it, her fingertips bled and her claws emerged - tiny, but the claws she remembered. She smiled, and her fangs began to assert themselves, gums aching as blunt human teeth were replaced. The robe ripped in three places and fell from her body as her tail sprouted and pushed back, her spine extending. Sallow human skin began to yield to grey flesh as she grew taller.

Her back ached as her wings struggled to emerge from it, and as she breathed, she felt the heat in her chest increasing, a machine inside her as though she were the cave it lived in, roaring it and filling it like a swarm at the peak of the eclipse. Her brood had begun to away, their bodies sinuous and swaying, heads tilting curiously. Her scent and voice were familiar, but the body they could hear was alien.

The queen's legs thickened, her feet lengthened, and talons sprouted from her toes. A few last shreds of fabric fell as she stretched her arms and spread her wings, shifting her weight, now twice as tall as the Riddick had been. His thoughts were in the machine, and the machine was in her, and she was growing more and more powerful the more that the machine ran.

She shook her head as its weight shifted: bone creaked as it stretched vertically, her sound-sight returning as massive spurs stretched out to the side, her bone crests curving up and down from her jaw and scalp. Looking around, she saw the room with a combination of human vision and sound-sight, and witnessed her brood sleepily moving towards her, acknowledging her again as queen, her new body fully capable of asserting her position.

She stepped forward, her long tail with its forked tip helping her balance, her wings spread without flapping, and caressed the nearest ones. They chittered and pressed against her as her warm hands moved over their bodies, her talons heavy and metallic as the machine and its genetic programming extended her still further. Wire webbing spread through her wings, and her sound-sight reached further and further as she commanded the machine.

Pale human flesh disappeared as she continued to grow towards her former mass, consuming her old body, her wings spreading further and further. She towered over her brood, standing on two legs, mind racing. The cave was not the world, the desert was not the world. There was another world—and her brood would prey on it. There were machines, spaceships, cybernetics—they would be hers, with the knowledge she now had.

With a soft croon, she put her brood to sleep again, then focused. The machine in her chest cooled, her wings folded in, and her claws withdrew. Kneeling, she grimaced as her sound-sight quieted, as her head compressed into a crest-less sphere, as her tail disappeared. She was tiny, frail, soft: she was still a predator.

* * *

The port agent squinted at the stubble-headed woman with goggles over her eyes and a robe that had seen better days. She counted creds haltingly, but her money was good and her movements sharp, dangerous. No one to ask too many questions of—but then, you never did have to ask why people were leaving M6-117. Wasn't a place that cared for you. Was just a stark place.

"What name should we use for you?" he grunted.

"Ridika," she said in a voice that was restraining itself from digging its fangs in and tearing the word apart. "I want to leave. I want my children to see a world beyond this one."

"No place for kids, nope."

Her stare had begun to make him uncomfortable, and he looked at her rucksack. It was heavy and lumpy, like she was carrying a bunch of round rocks.

"Want them to see every world," she said contemplatively, before walking out of the bright harsh sun into the shade of the ship.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this story all in a rush on a plane ride early in 2014. I've always liked the bio-raptors from _Pitch Black_ , and in some ways I'm glad that we haven't really seen more of them in the Riddick-verse. Into that void of knowledge, fanon rushes. It gives one an opportunity to try experiments like this one. It's also a thought experiment in how Riddick could have something resembling a happy ending without becoming a wholly different person—although you could well argue that that's exactly what happens here.


End file.
